Strobe sent its HP 3000 emulator into design

November 2004

Strobe sent its HP 3000 emulator into design

Willard West, president of Strobe Data Inc., has assigned engineering resources for a preliminary design of an emulation of a 32-bit PA-RISC processor. West said the product will run MPE in the same manner that HP’s PA-RISC CPUs presently run the HP 3000 operating system.

Strobe first brought up the 3000 emulator potential in the fall of 2003, a time when three companies were examining the prospect of building hardware- or software-based emulation of the HP 3000 processors. Software Research International (SRI) and Allegro Consultants haven’t made additional public announcements about their projects since 2003. Allegro’s VP Gavin Scott said his company was open to working with either Strobe or SRI on any projects those companies might initiate.

SRI last communicated anything about its emulator project in the spring of 2003. At the time, OpenMPE was making emulation a key goal of the homesteading advocacy group. OpenMPE’s chairman Jon Backus wanted the group to marshal funding for an emulation project. President Robert Boers said that SRI planned to proceed with R&D work “irrespective of license agreements or competition. Hardware emulators are ‘bread and butter’ stuff for us, and we certainly will not need — nor are interested in — development funding. Volume distribution of a prototype is probably the only way to find out if a product’s market really exists.”

Strobe apparently doesn’t need that kind of discovery to go ahead. West said that Strobe decided to proceed with its emulator project “because nobody stepped into this arena” since last year. “The need is still there, and we have a solution.” Strobe and SRI, the only two companies that have committed any engineering to an emulator, compete in the DEC PDP-11 emulator marketplace. SRI said last year that it might have a small prototype to show by the fall of 2003. No prototype has emerged, and then HP announced this year that it will transform HP 9000s to HP 3000s, on a very limited basis, to expand the available 3000 hardware base.

Allegro’s Scott said last year that funding an emulator would be the most serious challenge, in his view. But while a lot of homesteading attention has turned away from emulation and toward HP’s opening of the MPE source code to third parties, Scott said that “An emulator would be a valuable addition to the HP 3000 customer’s range of options — even more so as time goes on.”

West won’t be putting HP on a critical path to a PA-RISC emulator. He is unconcerned about whether HP will open up MPE/iX for enhancement and fixes by any third party. His firm says that its replacement processors for the DG Nova/Eclipse systems, DEC PDP-11s, and HP 1000 computers (Hawk, Osprey, and Kestrel, respectively) “run original legacy software unchanged, and are proven market successes.” He believes homesteading customers don’t want to make changes to their HP 3000s, so accepting HP’s 2003 intention of licensing MPE as-is, at $500 for use with an emulator, will work for his business plan.

Used HP 3000s are bound to remain plentiful in the years to come, but West is unconcerned about their impact on Strobe’s business model. “We’ve never competed with the used market,” he says of Strobe’s experiences with DG, DEC and HP systems. “People will want supported systems. Maintenance organizations have bought our products and installed them in accounts.”

Initial plans at Strobe are to create a software-based emulator, with a target date for beta testing about two years in the future. Working with a frozen MPE release will be okay in the short term, he added — at least palatable enough to start design work at Strobe.